Inside the August 2006 Issue

Photographed exclusively for V.F. by Patrick Demarchelier in Malibu, California, on May 6, 2006.

Features

[The Lady’s on a Roll](/fame/features/2006/08/swank200608)

Winning two Oscars has helped Hilary Swank heal the pain of a youth spent sleeping in cars and on borrowed floors, but her divorce from Chad Lowe has prompted a fresh round of soul-searching. With three new movies on the way, including Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia, Swank tells Leslie Bennetts why even Lowe’s courageous embrace of sobriety couldn’t save their marriage. Photographs by Patrick Demarchelier.

The Good Life
Annie Leibovitz and Richard Merkin spotlight Tony Bennett as the crooner celebrates his 80th birthday with a new album of all-star duets.

[A Flowering Evil](/politics/features/2006/08/joanroot200608)

Last January, acclaimed naturalist and wildlife filmmaker Joan Root was gunned down with an AK-47 in her bedroom. Four men have been charged with attempted robbery, but some friends and neighbors in Kenya’s "Happy Valley" believe it was a contract killing. Traveling to ecologically endangered Lake Naivasha, Mark Seal learns how an impassioned crusade may have made Root some mortal enemies. Photographs by Guillaume Bonn.

A Rock of Her Own
A year ago, Sheryl Crow had it all—nine Grammys, the body of a woman half her age, and an engagement to cycling superstar Lance Armstrong. Then a sudden breakup and a shocking diagnosis of breast cancer turned her world upside down. Meeting with Crow on her new U.S. tour, Frank DiGiacomo finds the fully recovered 44-year-old looking bravely down the winding road. Photographs by Norman Jean Roy.

G.E.’s Green Light
Amanda Griscom Little and Christian Witkin spotlight the new management team at the oldest industrial conglomerate on the planet, G.E., which is making cleaner technology better business.

Illusions of Arbus
More than 20 years after it was optioned, Patricia Bosworth’s biography of photographer Diane Arbus has finally become a movie—Fur, starring Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr. Recalling her friendship with Arbus, whose 1971 suicide sealed a major artistic legacy, Bosworth traces the project’s incredible (and incredibly frustrating) journey through the hands of some of Hollywood’s heaviest hitters. Portraits by Mary Ellen Mark.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Minimalist architect John Pawson is known for designing Calvin Klein stores and luxury apartments, but his latest project serves a higher purpose. Touring the grounds of Pawson’s hauntingly beautiful new Trappist monastery in the Czech Republic, Matt Tyrnauer gets a rare glimpse of a cloistered—and chic!—existence. Photographs by Todd Eberle.

Malibu’s Lost Boys
With Hollywood’s beach-movie craze and Life-magazine spreads, Malibu’s underground surfer culture lost its 50s innocence in a haze of drugs and decadence. Anticipating a biography of surfing’s dark prince, Miki "da Cat" Dora, Sheila Weller resurrects the rebellious ride of America’s first wave-catchers, whose passion sent some to celebrity, some to jail, and a few to their graves. Photographs by Norman Jean Roy.

Columns
Marty with an M
Martin Short has turned that B-list-celebrity fallback—the one-man Broadway show—into a hilarious satire of show-business narcissism. As Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me opens, James Wolcott wonders why superstar status has eluded one of the great comic geniuses of our age. Photographs by Mark Seliger.

A Riviera Row
Neither stormy weather nor anti-American boorishness can spoil the Cannes Film Festival for Dominick Dunne, who also stops in Paris, where a chance encounter at the Ritz brings him face-to-face with questions about Princess Diana’s death. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

[Washington Babylon](/politics/features/2006/08/washington200608)

With the conviction last November of Randall "Duke" Cunningham on charges of bribery and tax evasion, investigators are lifting the lid on a festering network of alleged corruption linking Republican lawmakers to shady defense contractors. As prosecutors continue to follow the money, Judy Bachrach explores an underworld where political favors were paid for in yachts, houses, and Persian rugs, not to mention fat envelopes of cash.

[The Vietnam Syndrome](/politics/features/2006/08/hitchens200608)

In the 1960s, the United States blanketed the Mekong River delta with Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant more devastating than napalm. Thirty years after the end of the Vietnam War, Christopher Hitchens visits a land where the poisoned legacy lives on in the children whose deformities it is said to have caused. Photographs by James Nachtwey.

Most Americans dismiss 9/11 conspiracy theories as crackpot fantasies, but that didn’t stop Dylan Avery, 22, and Korey Rowe, 23, from assailing the official version of events in their much-Googled documentary, Loose Change. As they prepare a third edition, Nancy Jo Sales explains how a movie produced on a laptop for $6,000 has given new life to the "9/11 Truth" movement and made millions of Americans go "Hmm … " Portraits by Gasper Tringale.